To the Letter. Simon Garfield
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Название: To the Letter

Автор: Simon Garfield

Издательство: Ingram

Жанр: Языкознание

Серия:

isbn: 9780857868602

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ crease. The woman goes into a box and emerges unblemished. The toil has gone, and with it some of the rewards.

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       Oscar Wilde writes to Mrs Wren in 1888.

      I wanted to write a book about those rewards. It would include a glimpse of some of the great correspondents and correspondences of the past, fold in a little history of mail, consider how we value, collect and archive letters in our lives, and look at how we were once firmly instructed to write such things. And I was keen to encounter those who felt similarly enthused about letters, some of them so much so that they were trying to bring letters back. I was concerned primarily with personal letters rather than business correspondence or official post, though these two may reveal plenty about our lives. The letters in this book are the sort that may quicken the heart, the sort that may often reflect, in Auden’s much loved words, joy from the girl and the boy. I had no ambitions to write a complete history of letter-writing, and I certainly wouldn’t attempt a definitive collection of great letters (the world is too old to accommodate such a thing, and lacks adequate shelving; it would be akin to collecting all the world’s art in one gallery), but I did want to applaud some of the letters that managed to achieve a similarly gargantuan task – the art of capturing a whole world on a single page. To the Letter will begin its travels in Roman Britain, home of the earliest letters we have, with the discovery that the ancient method of opening and closing a letter – greetings and farewells – are those that we still use 2,000 years later. The letter hasn’t really changed much in all that time. But now we may be at risk of letting it change irreversibly.

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      The auction took place on an autumnal Thursday only a few weeks after the close of the Olympics. A few yards from the auction room people queued to check their email at the Apple Store. Nearby, in Bond Street, there was Smythson, the posh stationer and leather goods shop. Its creative consultant Samantha Cameron, wife of the prime minister, had presumably been consulted on the display of a £50 box of Empire notecards with an Indian elephant motif, one of the many items in the shop keeping elegance alive against the touch screen odds.

      But amidst these symbols of the new and the old stood something timeless. Like a good novel, an auction house promises escape, drama and revelation, and the prospect of greater truth. It also promises commerce, of course, the prospect of proud ownership on one hand and profit on the other, an equation as old as the Babylonian market stall. Occasionally a good sale also offers proper history and biographical insight, and perhaps an understanding of life hitherto denied to us. The conjuring sale was one such occasion. How else would these startling people be remembered in an age when conjuring has been largely reduced to Las Vegas and bar mitzvahs? There just isn’t much call for illusionists in the digital age, not only because there are so many other ways to spend an evening, but because the Internet has long laid bare magic’s hidden compartments. Illusionists have been obliged to become postmodernists, the masterful showmen Penn & Teller performing tricks and then instantly revealing how they were done, confident that the gap between knowledge and the ability to apply it in performance will safeguard their profession for a while.

      I learnt from Walker’s letters that the girl in the Radium Girl illusion concealed herself behind a panel before the blades went through, and that the box was deeper than we perceived, but this didn’t make me a magician. I wasn’t particularly interested in how the tricks were done. I was interested in who had done them, and why, and how these people lived their lives. By the date of the auction I had become determined to buy Walker’s letters, and so, on that Thursday afternoon I exchanged my credit card details for a cardboard bidding paddle and sat in the middle of the room as the lots tumbled towards mine.

      First there were books to sell. These didn’t have much to do with magic, or not directly. There was Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge, known to his readers as Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Won-derland, 1930, the Black Sun Press, short split to head of upper joint, glassine dust jacket, chipped at spine ends and corners, estimate £4,000 to £6,000 – unsold. There was Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray, first edition in book form, 1891, first issue with misprint on p. 208 (‘nd’ rather than ‘and’), darkened, corners bumped, estimate £750 to £1,000, sold for £700.

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       Walker in a straitjacket.

      When it was time for the magic, one name kept recurring like marked aces. Bayard Grimshaw, who had died in 1994, was a recipient of a great many letters in the sale, and he appeared to be one of magic’s few super-groupies. He was a magic correspondent for World’s Fair, the weekly newspaper for showmen, and he became friends with many of magic’s stars. Perhaps seeing a gap in market, and a gullible public, he also became a performer himself, touting a mind-reading act with his wife Marion. In so doing he achieved an illusionist’s connoisseurship and the trust of the Magic Circle, and amassed a large hoard of oddments and correspondence. Perhaps he thought they would be valuable one day.

      As a keen collector – stamps, tube maps, the usual male detritus – I had been to a few auctions before, but none were as sparsely attended as this. By the time the books had been sold there were about 15 of us left, and I recognised half of them from the preview the previous day. Most of those who had attended for the books portion had drifted away, and although a few others joined us on the phone and online, the prices rarely exceeded their upper estimate, which filled me with hope. And those who were there seemed predominantly interested in the props and physical tricks rather than documents. But just as I began to feel confident that I would get the Walker letters for a steal, or at least something near the lower estimate of £300, a few of the items started going for three or four times their estimate, and a handful went for more than £1,000. One of these was a vast hoard of card tricks, the earliest dating from 1820, an array of ‘forcing decks’, ‘moving pip cards’ and ‘waterfall shuffle’ packs, the names themselves so alluring that I had to check my urge to buy them on impulse.

      The lot simply titled ‘Mentalists’ was a collection of letters relating to mind-reading, with a detailed account of an act performed by The Great Nixon, and one letter from 1938 suggesting that The Great Nixon was such a phenomenon that he might be worthy of investigation in a laboratory. The Great Nixon was a sham, of course, and only as great as his stooge in the audience. But such was the allure of the performers in this period that I imagined an audience where few were prepared not to believe; they wanted the trick not to be a trick, but to be magic. The world held enough impending horrors in 1938, so why be cynical when you could be amazed? It wasn’t like today, when magic can only be a trick, and the pleasure is not in the illusion but in figuring it out.

      When I got them home I read again how to saw a girl in half (a trick box, a very supple assistant, a pair of electronically controlled feet at one end) and also how to make it look as though a cabinet was smaller СКАЧАТЬ